(1948's Abbott And Costello Meet Frankenstein), monsters (1943's Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man), and New York-based mammals (1952's Bela Lugosi Meets A Brooklyn Gorilla). But before any of these historic encounters, he met the Ritz brothers in 1939's The Gorilla. Adapted from Ralph Spence's play, the film opens with a montage of screaming newspaper headlines documenting the reign of terror of a mysterious simian assassin who leaves threatening letters at the homes of his victims. The film then arrives at the room of maid Patsy Kelly, who reads aloud from Romeo And Juliet before being rudely interrupted by the titular gorilla and his malevolent brand of monkeyshines. This prompts her employer (Lionel Atwill) to hire Harry, Jimmy, and Al Ritz to hunt down the gorilla, a decision he begins to regret once the mere mention of the word "gorilla" sends the trio reeling into an orgy of shaking, eye-bugging, and agitated wordplay. The brothers' investigative tactics do little to inspire confidence: When Kelly tells them she spent the evening with Shakespeare, they angrily demand to know the writer's whereabouts. The Ritzes do no better with the butler (Lugosi); they mock his accent and act aggressively, until he flips one of them in self-defense. At the stroke of midnight, Atwill is abducted, and his disappearance is followed by a series of blackouts, disappearances, and the arrival of a mysterious stranger (Joseph Calleia) purporting to be a detective. In spite of their nonstop clowning, the Ritz brothers eventually encounter the gorilla in the house's basement, though they initially mistake it for a wiseacre in a raccoon coat. Lugosi, meanwhile, has a suspiciously Clark Kent-like way of disappearing whenever trouble and excitement arrive. His mysterious absences turn out to be one of many red herrings, after it's revealed that there are two gorillas, a real trained one and a mass murderer–Calleia–who's only pretending to be a gorilla. Calleia lays out the particulars of his nefarious plot just before Lugosi apprehends him, in the process steeling himself for his fateful meeting with a Brooklyn gorilla 13 years later.
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